“From 2010 to 2015, I traveled across Europe and the United States hitch-hiking with the goal of meeting the men and women who made the radical choice to live far from cities, breaking with a way of life that they often see as obsessed with performance and efficiency and whose only horizon would be the consumption.
Without a precise itinerary, forced by encounters and chance, this trip has taken the sense of an initiatory quest similar to the quest of these families. In this work, it is less a political and theoretical depth that I have tried to probe than a daily and immediate practice, hence a certain need to work with detachment in the face of images that force us to position ourselves.
The heterogeneity of places and situations encountered shows us the magnificent paradox of the pursuit of a utopia by permanent empirical trial and error. Unstable constructions, clever recuperation and astute diversion, or applications of disparate agricultural theories thus reveal the richness of human trajectories. The strategies deployed aim at greater independence in energy, food, economic or social. There is a spontaneous response to societies that these “neo-rurals” have left, but in some cases there is doubt and uncertainty. Space is thus well exploited, but is never subject; time has lost its tense linearity to become a slow and thought-out rhythm. No more ticking but the ballet of days and nights, seasons or lunar cycles. (…) »
Antoine Bruy
Antoine Bruy – Scrublands
Until June 22
Galerie Le Carré d’Art – Centre culturel Pôle Sud
1 rue de la Conterie – BP 37604
35131 Chartres de Bretagne cedex
